John Lacny:
> Really? Are you saying that socialism will automatically eliminate national
> inequalities? Isn't this on a par with saying that racism will best be
> dealt with "after the revolution"?
>
> Or perhaps you're saying that "socialism" isn't really socialism until it
> eliminates national inequalities and racism, but that begs the question.
Significant reparations would be adjustments of net worth. Net worth is significant in capitalism, because it tends to determine ownership of the means of production and thus social dominance, but in socialism it wouldn't mean very much -- differences between persons are supposed to be based on their work, and the ownership of the means of production is equally distributed. In communism, of course, reparations would be impossible because nobody would have a net worth in the liberal capitalist sense.
I believe racism is driven by class war. Although it's possible to have a class-war society without it (Rome) it doesn't seem possible to have a liberal class-war society without it, judging by its enduring ability to appear and reappear in Western liberal communities. Hence, reparations can't be expected to end racism. Indeed, I have seen racists of the White nationalist sort advocate reparations on the Net: "Pay them off and send them home."
Even socialism won't necessarily end racism (or imperialism) because class distinctions are still possible in socialism (and in fact may be observed in the history of communities which called themselves socialist).
If you want to get rid of racism, as I said to Justin, you need emergence from liberalism, capitalism, Western civilization and the class war, that is, anarchist communism. Nothing short of a radical revision of social relations is going to do the trick. You can't maintain class without class war, and given class war, any distinction between persons, especially one with a history, can become one of its fronts. Very basically, if you have more power or stuff than other people, you can't keep them to yourself without the continuous use of force in association with similar stake-holders. But when anyone uses, organizes, and institutionalizes force, distinctions like locale, age, gender, race, language, and religious difference can become valuable implements, that is, weapons, and this is what we generally observe.
Reparations have another purpose: given liberal principles, they are just, and liberals are supposed to believe in justice, especially as to the disposition of property. In a sense, they are a resignation to the fact of enduring racism -- liberals can't assume, as their predecessors of a few generations ago apparently did, that the problem will be taken care of by integration and a common, harmonious, non-racial sharing of the capitalistically burgeoning wealth. Evidently this is not going to happen; I can look out my window and see that. So instead, the community as a whole, if it wants to remain liberal _and_ just, must accept the division and pay its outstanding debt to descendants of the Negro slaves, just as it has paid outstanding debts to other wronged minorities. Since we are presently stuck with liberalism and capitalism, one might as well make an issue of it, but even if this long shot were to succeed, I wouldn't expect very much of it in terms of solving our ongoing social problems. I think one should be realistic about this.